Throughout his career, the celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) created exceptional portraits of artists, writers, actors, dancers, and musicians, many of whom were his close friends. As a group, these portraits—many of which were not commissioned—are often highly charged, intimate, witty, idiosyncratic, and more experimental than his formal portraiture. Brilliant works of art and penetrating character studies, they are also records of relationships, influences, aspirations, and allegiances.

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends brings together about ninety of the artist's paintings and drawings of members of his impressive artistic circle. The individuals seen through Sargent's eyes represent a range of leading figures in the creative arts of the time such as artists Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and the actor Ellen Terry, among others. The exhibition features some of Sargent's most celebrated full-length portraits (Dr. Pozzi at Home, Hammer Museum), his dazzling subject paintings created in the Italian countryside (Group with Parasols [Siesta], private collection), and brilliant watercolors (In the Generalife, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) alongside lesser-known portrait sketches of his intimate friends (Vernon Lee, 1881, Tate). The exhibition explores the friendships between Sargent and his artistic sitters, as well as the significance of these relationships to his life and art.

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola is the first major exhibition to focus on the German-born Grete Stern and the Argentinean Horacio Coppola, two leading figures of avant-garde photography who established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition begins in the late 1920s with each artist’s initial forays into photography and typographic design. In Berlin in 1927, Stern began taking private classes with Walter Peterhans, who was soon to become head of photography at the Bauhaus. A year later, in Peterhans’s studio, she met Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach, with whom she opened a pioneering studio specializing in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the studio ringl + pit embraced both commercial and avant-garde loyalties, creating proto-feminist works. In Buenos Aires during the same period, Coppola initiated his photographic experimentations, exploring his surroundings and contributing to the discourse on modernist practices across media in local cultural magazines. In 1929 he founded the Buenos Aires Film Club to introduce the most innovative foreign films to Argentine audiences. His early works show the burgeoning interest in new modes of photographic expression that led him to the Bauhaus in 1932, where he met Stern and they began their joint history.
Following the close of the Bauhaus and amid the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, Stern and Coppola fled Germany. Stern arrived first in London, where her friends included activists affiliated with leftist circles and where she made her now iconic portraits of German exiles, including those of Bertolt Brecht and Karl Korsch. After traveling through Europe, camera in hand, Coppola joined Stern in London, where he pursued a modernist idiom in his photographs of the fabric of the city, tinged alternately with social concern and surrealist strangeness.
In the summer of 1935, Stern and Coppola embarked for Buenos Aires, where they mounted an exhibition in the offices of the avant-garde magazine Sur, announcing the arrival of modern photography in Argentina. The unique character of Buenos Aires was captured in Coppola’s photographic encounters from the city’s center to its outskirts, and in Stern’s numerous portraits of the city’s intelligentsia, from feminist playwright Amparo Alvajar to essayist Jorge Luis Borges to poet-politician Pablo Neruda. The exhibition ends in the early 1950s, with Stern’s forward-thinking Sueños (Dreams), a series of photomontages she contributed to the popular women’s magazine Idilio, portraying women’s dreams mobilized by the unfulfilled promises of the Peronist regime in Argentine society with urgency and surreal wit.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication edited by Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister with a selection of original texts by Stern and Coppola translated into English by Rachel Kaplan. The catalogue will consist of three essays on the artists written by the exhibition curators and scholar Jodi Roberts.

Film Screening: Doris Salcedo’s Public Works
Daily, June 26–October 12, 11 am–5:30 pm
New Media Theater
A short video documenting the artist’s site-specific public projects and architectural interventions is
screened continuously in conjunction with the exhibition.
Free with admission. For more information, visit guggenheim.org/filmscreenings.

Press Release
Dia Art Foundation Acquires Dream House by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi
Dream House Will Be Presented at Dia:Chelsea from June 16 to October 24, 2015
Just Alap Raga Ensemble Will Perform on June 13, 19, and 27, 2015

New York, NY – Today, Dia Art Foundation announced the acquisition of a unique version of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, titled Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House. Young and Zazeela created this new iteration in collaboration with their disciple, artist and musician Jung Hee Choi. In honor of this historic acquisition, Dia will present the unique version at Dia:Chelsea at 545 West 22nd Street from June 16 to October 24, 2015. As a long-time supporter of Young and Zazeela’s work, Dia presented Dream House at 6 Harrison Street in New York City from 1979 to 1985 and has supported and hosted numerous concerts and recordings of Young and Zazeela’s exceptional work. This acquisition demonstrates Dia’s strong commitment to fostering in-depth and long-term relationships with artists.

Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House will debut with a special series of Just Alap Raga Ensemble concerts on June 13, 19, and 27 with vocals by Young, Zazeela, and Choi and Naren Budhkar on the tabla. An ongoing series of scheduled performances will be held between June and October.

“Dream House is a landmark contribution to the history of sound and light, a truly immersive experience, and one of the most important manifestations of Young and Zazeela’s collaborations,” said Jessica Morgan, Director, Dia Art Foundation. “Since 2015 marks Young’s 80th birthday, Zazeela’s 75th birthday, and the 40th anniversary of the Dream Festival supported by Dia, it is the ideal moment to add this unique sound-and-light installation to Dia’s collection and ensure its vitality far into the future. We are thrilled to activate Dia’s space in Chelsea this summer by presenting Dream House with a full program of performances.”

The version of Dream House at Dia:Chelsea will incorporate a newly designed, site-specific sound-and-light environment that was conceived for Dia by Young, Zazeela, and Choi. The work will include a new configuration of its traditional elements—Young’s sine-wave sound environment and Zazeela’s light environment—and will incorporate a new version of Choi’s installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX .

Young, a crucial figure in the historical emergence of Minimalist music, is among the most influential representatives of the American avant-garde. He began using sustained tones and expanded concepts of time in the 1950s and formulated the Dream House concept with Zazeela in 1962. Together, they have developed numerous sound-and-light installations and performances, among which Dream House stands as the essential environment for their time-based performances.

Dream House has been described as “a time installation measured by a continuous frequency environment in sound and light, in which a work would be played continuously and ultimately exist in time as a living organism with a life and tradition of its own.” Understood as a durational work to be experienced several times over a lifetime, the first presentations of Dream House took place at Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Munich in 1969, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1971, and the yearlong presentation of Dream House at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972. The 1979–85 iteration Dream House at 6 Harrison Street in New York, commissioned by Dia, was followed by MELA Foundation’s long-term Dream House that opened in 1993 and continues to operate at 275 Church Street in New York today. Dia’s acquisition of the artists’ Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House will ensure the conservation and future presentations of this momentous installation.

About the Artists
La Monte Young (b. 1935, Bern, Idaho) began playing saxophone at age seven and pursued music studies in the 1950s with such recognized figures as Richard Maxfield, Leonard Stein, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. At Yoko Ono’s studio, Young directed the first loft concert series from 1960 to 1961. As a founding member of the Fluxus movement, he edited An Anthology of Chance Operations in 1963 and orchestrated many of the movement’s key events during the 1960s. In 1962, Young began collaborating with artist Marian Zazeela, featuring her light installations, sculptures, and calligraphic creations in his durational sound environments. They became disciples of master Kirana singer Pandit Pran Nath in 1970 and their works have addressed both Western traditions and Indian classical music ever since. Young is credited to be the founder of Minimalist music and is a historical reference for sustained-tone and drone-based compositions, such as The Well-Tuned Piano that is widely regarded as one of the major piano works of the twentieth century. Artists and musicians including John Cale, Walter De Maria, Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Terry Riley, and Andy Warhol have acknowledged Young’s enormous impact. And together with his ensembles (from the Theater of Eternal Music to the Forever Bad Blues Band to the recent Just Alap Raga Ensemble), Young has influenced art-rock bands like the Velvet Underground, Faust, and many others.

Marian Zazeela (b. 1940, New York City) studied painting and calligraphy and has been working with light as a medium since the early 1960s. Her light installations and projection series have been widely shown throughout the United States and Europe. Since 1962, they have become an integral part of Dream House and the Theater of Eternal Music. Like Young, Zazeela has been a disciple of Pandit Pran Nath since 1970 and has devoted the last several decades to the performance of Indian classical music as part of their Just Alap Raga Ensemble. Typically taking the form of light environments and also performances, Zazeela’s works have been credited with influencing Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and have been the object of group and solo presentations at Dia, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and most recently at the Kunst im Regenbogenstadl Dream House in Polling, Germany, where a retrospective of her drawings was organized.

Jung Hee Choi (b. 1969, Seoul, Korea) has collaborated with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela since 1999. Choi’s work has been presented in Asia, Europe, and North America at such venues as FRAC Franche-Comté in Besançon, France; Berliner Festspiele in Berlin, Germany; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the MELA Foundation Dream House, New York; the FRESH Festival in Bangkok; and the Korea Experimental Arts Festival in Seoul. Choi is also a founding producer and director of Mantra TV—a cable and webcast vehicle for advanced arts in New York and Korea—where she worked from 1998 to 2006. Commissioned by MELA Foundation, her performance and installation with video and sound, titled RICE, was presented at the ongoing installation of Dream House at 275 Church Street in New York in 2003. In 2006 she received the Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds Award, supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2015 she received a project grants award from New Music USA. As disciples of the classical Kirana vocal tradition, Young, Zazeela, and Choi founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble in 2002. Choi has performed as vocalist in every concert ever since, including those at the MELA Foundation Dream House; the five-concert Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tribute Tour in Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Polling, Germany, in 2012; the Yoko Ono Courage Award ceremony; the Guggenheim’s The Third Mind Live concert series in 2009; and the Merce Cunningham Memorial celebration in 2009. Her work is in the collection of FRAC Franche-Comté.

Dia Art Foundation
Founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is committed to initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving extraordinary art projects. Dia:Beacon opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York. Dia also maintains several long-term sites including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, which was inaugurated at Documenta 7 in 1982), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all of which are located in New York City; the Dan Flavin Art Institute (established in 1983) in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake, Utah; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; and Flavin’s untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection) (1973) in Munich, Germany. Dia also commissions original Artist Web Projects and produces scholarly publications.

Dia currently presents temporary installations, performances, lectures, and readings on West 22nd Street in the Chelsea section of New York City, the neighborhood it helped pioneer. Plans for a new project space are underway.

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange, the first New York City solo museum exhibition of the work of a painter (born Philadelphia, 1946) whose intensely color-based abstractions have won steadily mounting recognition since the mid-1990s. The exhibition will feature twenty-nine paintings and works on paper created between 2008 and 2015, including the 2013 title work. Following time spent in Italy and then later in Egypt in the mid-1990s, Whitney developed the weighty, almost architectural approach that has now become his signature style. Rhythmic and lyrical, with a combination of pre-ordained structure and improvisation inspired in part by his love of jazz, the square-format paintings arrange rectangles of vivid, single colors in a deliberately irregular grid, with the close-fitting, many-hued “bricks” or “tiles” stacked vertically and arrayed in horizontal bands.

A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring contributions by Lauren Haynes, Robert Storr, Lowery Stokes Sims and Stanley Whitney, with a foreword by Thelma Golden.

Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange is made possible thanks to support from the following government agencies: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the New York City Council.

Everything, Everyday presents three emerging artists whose innovative works, while diverse in form and subject matter, reflect overlapping affinities. Sadie Barnette, Lauren Halsey and Eric Mack explore ideas of disappearance and reemergence, shifting visibilities and the beauty of the everyday. Each artist closely considers matters of artistic process by playing with scale, the ephemeral quality of their materials, the nature of time and language, and the relationships between the objects they create.

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) deals in the currency of west-coast vernacular, the everyday, fantasy and abstraction, and is unconfined to any particular medium. Whether working in photography or highly detailed drawing, large-scale installations or zine and book making, Barnette often turns her attention toward unexpected locations of identity construction, family histories, subculture coding, celebration and excess. Her recent works have focused on the poetics of naming race horses and the narrative of the racetrack.

Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) creates sculptural environments and flat works that synthesize imagery from contemporary life in Harlem and Los Angeles with ancient Egypt, outer space, Technicolor and Funk. For Everything, Everyday, Halsey transforms part of the Mezzanine gallery with a site-specific environment made of hieroglyphic reliefs set in an interplanetary desert oasis.

Eric Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) is an abstract painter who incorporates textiles and readymade surfaces in his colorful compositions. Inspired equally by Abstract Expressionism and fashion, Mack integrates function with form in his work, using pegboards, moving blankets and other utilitarian objects in lyrical and unexpected ways.

The Artist-in-Residence program is at the core of the Studio Museum’s mission, and gives the institution its name. Since the Museum’s founding in 1968, more than 100 artists in residence have created and shown work in the Museum’s studios and galleries. Among the program’s alumni are some of the most renowned artists working today, including Sanford Biggers, Leonardo Drew, David Hammons, Leslie Hewitt, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, Nari Ward and Kehinde Wiley.

The Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council for the Arts, a state agency; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Robert Lehman Foundation; and New York Community Trust.

Harlem Postcards is an ongoing project that invites contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds to reflect on Harlem as a site of cultural activity, political vitality, visual stimuli, artistic contemplation and creative production. Representing intimate and dynamic perspectives of Harlem, the images reflect the idiosyncratic visions of contemporary artists from a wide range of backgrounds and locations. Each photograph has been reproduced as a limited edition postcard available free to visitors.

This season, we are pleased to feature postcard images by Ellen Lesperance, Narcissister, King Texas and Demettrius Wright.

Over the course of more than three decades, artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady has won acclaim for her installations, performances and texts addressing the subjects of diaspora, hybridity and black female subjectivity. Born in Boston in 1934 and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a U.S. government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980.

In her landmark performance Art Is…, O’Grady entered her own float in the September 1983 African-American Day Parade, riding up Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) with fifteen collaborators dressed in white. Displayed on top of the float was an enormous, ornate gilded frame, while the words “Art Is…” were emblazoned on the float’s decorative skirt. At various points along the route, O’Grady and her collaborators jumped off the float and held up empty, gilded picture frames, inviting people to pose in them. The joyful responses turned parade onlookers into participants, affirmed the readiness of Harlem’s residents to see themselves as works of art, and created an irreplaceable record of the people and places of Harlem some thirty years ago. These color slides were taken by various people who witnessed the performance, and were later collected by O’Grady to compose the series. The forty images on view capture the energy and spirit of the original performance.

Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History and Community is an annual, eight-month residency in which New York–area high school students explore the history and techniques of photography. Through experimentation, discussion, gallery visits and workshops led by contemporary artists, the students build community as each explores and defines his or her art practice. Since the program’s founding in 2001, the James VanDerZee (1886–1983) archives—housed at The Studio Museum in Harlem—have been the primary catalyst for the students’ critical reflections on the representation of culture and community.

One Stop Down references a technical choice in photography to allow less light into the camera, which can increase depth of field, image sharpness and effectively convey intention. Some of this year’s students have composed narratives that require more light to illuminate subjects or ideas, while others deliberately kept light from entering to offer dramatic readings of an image and invite viewers to construct their own stories. This group has given particular attention to the use of shadows in creating plural narratives, as well as patterns, textures and objects in personal environments that reflect the subjects’ inner complexities. Students have also been influenced by the cinematic quality of documentarian style photographs by Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems and Malick Sidibe.

Expanding the Walls participants have selected VanDerZee photographs that mirror the same sense of performance, observation, culture and community present in their works.

Our deepest gratitude goes to Donna Mussenden VanDerZee for her continued support of The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Expanding the Walls program.

Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem are made possible thanks to support from the following government agencies: The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the New York City Council.

Expanding the Walls is made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; Colgate-Palmolive; Dedalus Foundation, Inc.; The Keith Haring Foundation; and Joy of Giving Something.

Our daily experience of urban space is technologically mediated – from the images on screens in taxis, subway stations and streets, to the maps, cameras, and social networks of our smart phones. We use these devices to navigate, document, and share our lives online. In so doing, we participate in the creation of a rapidly changing digital landscape. Responding to this contemporary context, Image Objects brings together the work of seven international artists who share an interest in digital culture and its influence on the relationship between images and objects.

With new works produced specifically for this exhibition, each artist has drawn from source images and used digital means to create new sculptural forms. Alice Channer’s
R O C K F A L L (2015) and Jon Rafman’s New Age Demanded (2015) employ advanced digital fabrication tools to transform images into three-dimensional objects. Other artists – like Amanda Ross-Ho and Artie Vierkant – have created works that directly address the photographic life of a sculpture when it is documented and shared online. As images are rendered into objects and objects are circulated as images, the boundaries between the physical and the virtual are blurred, challenging us to rethink how we see the world around us.

Brooklyn-based artist KAWS straddles the line between fine art and popular culture in his large-scale sculptures and brightly colored paintings, thoughtfully playing with imagery associated with consumer products and global brands.

ALONG THE WAY, KAWS's colossal eighteen-foot-high wood sculpture, greets visitors in our Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion and Lobby. Portraying a pair of gigantic figures with their heads lowered and with one arm around each other in a gentle embrace, the sculpture alludes to familiar childhood toys and cartoon characters while at the same time transforming their identities with a radical shift in scale, presenting them as monumental cultural presences.

The exhibition also includes the paintings GLASS SMILE (2012) and SHOULD I BE ATTACKING (2013).

KAWS: “ALONG THE WAY” is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of the Mary Boone Gallery.

Madison Square Park Conservancy and acclaimed artist Teresita Fernández announce Fata Morgana, a major public art installation in Madison Square Park to be on view June 1, 2015 – winter 2015-16. The outdoor sculpture, the largest and most ambitious ever mounted by Mad. Sq. Art, the free contemporary art program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, will consist of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that create canopies above the pathways around the park’s central Oval Lawn. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Parks & Recreation Director of Art and Antiquities Jonathan Kuhn, and NYC & Company President and CEO Fred Dixon joined the artist in making the announcement.
In nature, a Fata Morgana is a horizontal mirage that forms across the horizon line.Alluding to this phenomenon,Fernández’s project introduces a shimmering horizontal element to the park that will engage visitors in a dynamic experience. The installation is a mirror-polished, golden metal sculpture that will hover above the park’s winding walkways to define a luminous experiential passage for park visitors. The metal forms, perforated with intricate patterns reminiscent of foliage, will create abstract flickering effects as sunlight filters through the canopy, casting a golden glow across the expanse of the work, paths, and passersby. The outdoor exhibition will open in June and will be on view through winter, allowing visitors the opportunity to experience and interact with the piece through all four seasons. The project is Mad. Sq. Art’s first to fully utilize the upper register of a visitor’s space.

Further activating The Drawing Center's newly designed exhibition spaces, each year an artist will be invited to create a wall drawing in the gallery’s main entryway and stairwell. The Center continues this initiative in April 2015 with a commission by contemporary artist Abdelkader Benchamma (b. 1975, Mazamet, France).

Abdelkader Benchamma will create an astrological vortex in his strikingly graphic, site-specific drawing Representation of Dark Matter (2015). Rendered in intensely black lines against the wall’s white surface, the work is a painstaking depiction of the complexity of the solar system and its nearly imperceptible dark matter. The physically expansive image consists of swirling masses of lines that resemble scientific illustrations of the Big Bang and allude to explosive cosmic forces. Benchamma’s monochromatic use of such drawing tools as felt-tip pens, ink, and charcoal create a subtle array of tones and textures. In addition to the highly articulated drawing, the piece comprises a wooden construction adorned with collages from pages of old astronomy encyclopedias, symbolizing the structured scaffolding on which our universe is built. As an occult mapping of time and space, the installation gives form to that which is infinitely large and perpetually transforming.